Mysterious Blob Found Off Alaska
Posted by: Loren Coleman on July 15th, 2009
Photo courtesy North Slope Borough.
A mysterious glob of unknown material up to 12 miles long has appeared in the Arctic Ocean, off Alaska’s northern coast. Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says, “It’s certainly biological. It’s definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter. It’s definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it’s some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism.”
Something big and strange is floating through the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow, writes Don Hunter in the Anchorage Daily News.
The stuff is “gooey” and looks dark against the bright white ice floating in the Arctic Ocean.
Hasenauer said the Coast Guard’s samples are being analyzed in Anchorage. Results may be back sometime next week, he said.
For more details and the complete article, see here.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
12 MILES long!!! If it truly is not petrol/chemical in nature then it almost has to be some form of algae (probably dead) to cover that large an area.
I wonder if this mass is a product of climate change, previous hazardous spills or maybe just a natural occurrence we never noticed before (like the red tide is natural). We’re finding so many new things in the ocean that I wonder if this is a known organism or something new to us.
Weird indeed. To be honest, this reminds of the Intelligent/Sentient water-borne “Blob” that terrorized the rafters in Stephen King’s classic “The Raft.” Folks out there may remember it as one of the “tales” in one of the “Creepshow” movies—I forget which one. Couldn’t help but “notice.” 🙂
I go for red algae, as well.
It’s got to be some kind of algae like substance…I will assume that somebody or several somebodies are taking samples and investigating.
Odd, and odd it’s never been discovered before…assuming it is something new.
Course along the lines of S.K. — anyone ever read Phantoms by Dean Koontz? It’s about an amorphous blob that is sentient and has gone undetected for ages…responsible for mass disappearances such as Roanoake, and other historical anomalies…definitely a bad critter:)
I poked around some old news stories and found out that something very similar happened in Florida 7 years ago. The scientists who studied it said that it might be an algae bloom/something associated with diatoms. I’m not sure if these two blobs are the same, but many of the details – huge patches of dark material, probably organic – seem to be the same. Hope this helps!
Cryptidsrus – I thought the same thing. The show scared me silly as a kid. I still look for it every time I’m near water.
Like everyone else, my guess is algae.
Does anyone remember the case of a mysterious rain of gelatinous goo that occurred in the town of Oakville in Washington State? Since Washington State is near Alaska, it crossed my mind that there may be some correlation between these two.
Here is a brief blurb about it from Unsolved Mysteries:
“In August of 1994, a bizarre sequence of events began to occur in the small town of Oakville, Washington. Gelatinous blobs of biological material began to rain down over an area of over 20 square miles during a storm. It would happen six times in 1994, and continue periodically thereafter. The latest was during the third week of June 1997.
The fact that this was going on would not generally be known outside of Oakville until an episode of Unsolved Mysteries on Thursday, May 8, 1997, hosted by Robert Stack.
It came from the skies to wreck havoc on the earth. It sounds like a bad science fiction movie, but for the little town in Washington there was nothing entertaining about the scourge that befell them in 1994. Six times it rained down from above, leaving dozens of local residents ill, and several pets and small animals dead.”
It all happened in Oakville, Washington, population 665. Here in Oakville, clouds fill the skies daily, bringing rain some 275 days a year. So, when it began pouring on the morning of August 7, 1994, no one was particularly concerned – until they realized it wasn’t raining rain. It was raining tiny blobs of gelatinous goo. It came down in torrents, blanketing 20 square miles, and brought with it something of a plague.
Maurice Gobeil (local resident): ‘I got sick, my wife got sick, my daughter got sick and everybody that lived here got sick.’
Beverly Roberts (local resident): ” Everybody in the whole town came down with something like the flu, only it was a really hard flu that lasted from seven weeks to two or three months.”
Algae, I see stuff that looks a lot like this all the time.
Reminds me of the black stuff in the Dagon movie.
If it is unknown, then what if it was dormant in a glacier that recently melted and went crazy? With the polar ice caps melting at their current rate, we might actually see a world without ice really soon.
i vote for algae or seaweed bloom. the southeast coast is having a problem with an unusually large bloom of the seaweed called gracilaria. it’s an invader from Japan and is hairy and stringy and gets caught in everything. it’s messing with the commercial shrimp guys pretty bad.
It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. ”
— H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness
Maybe is this, or the “thing” it came from, the source of those strange sounds reccorded off the pacific coast. You know the Bloop.
Hmm… and now the wicked machine elves inside my brain are wondering if this might not have something to do with the sudden —and still unexplained— resignation of Sarah Palin.
MUAHAHAHAHAAAAAA! 😉
must be megalodon dung!!!!
Actually Shumway10973, you needn’t worry about there being no ice anytime soon. According to NASA GISS data, the earth is in a cooling phase with 2008 showing the greatest year to year temperature drop ever. This is supported by all four major global temperature tracking outlets, by the way.
Hoosierhunter: Agreed!
I think that the blob, whatever it is, may be a result of some unusual deep sea activity. Has there been any sea quakes or sea floor eruptions -anything of that nature that might have caused a massive dying off of some kind of algae or sea plant life?
$5 it is Jellyfish remains (not 1 but millions of them) and the bacteria that feeds it
blob?? is it skin at least??? maybe a new modern levithan
I also thought of “The Raft” the instant I saw the picture XD.
Anyway. I don’t think it’s algae. It would have started forming gradually and the “blob” would have been noticed before it grew to 12 miles long. I may be incorrect of when they first discovered the blob. My computer isn’t being too happy with me and won’t let me view the link =/. And I’m no algae expert but I’ve had experiences with it in my fish tank and it happens gradually.
I know it was found in the ocean but it looks like pond scum to me
Well, the kelp forests off the coast of Cali grow about a foot a day. Granted its would still take 5000 days to make a one mile long strand.
Maybe there’s a faster growing algae out there we know nothing about.
As for slime algaes, it is gradual, but in my experience its kind of exponential. First there’s a corner I didn’t wipe well enough, the next day theres a little more, next day quite a bit more, than a crapload more, than the entire tank is covered in it. Of course I know I overfeed my fish, and I have a longer than normal photoperiod, so that can explain the algae growth.
I still personally think its related to Shub Niggurath or Shoggoth or whatever its called. I’m still new to the Cthulhu Mythos.
I think Allan Slavik hit the nail on the head right here with the amusing reference to the works of good ol’ H.P. Lovecraft.
(Rogutaan, my bet would be on Shoggoth, between the two – they’re the amoeba-like buggers)
But seriously, it’s probably some sort of algae, or a bunch of dead stuff.